Sir(s),

I, one of your campaign’s supporters, need some answers from your principal candidate – John McCain. Is he in this to win, or is he more interested in being friends with the opposition? Does he want to be president or is he harboring a secret desperate longing to go back to being one of a hundred?

Personally, I’m beginning to get the impression that it’s the latter.

Your campaign’s strange decision to shy away from confronting the Democrats for their active role in preventing the GSEs from oversight and regulation all the while receiving thousands of dollars in contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives can only be explained by the argument that Senator McCain wanted the rescue bill to pass and he didn’t want partisan politics to stand in the way. Which would be why Governor Palin curiously avoided mentioning the real cause for the crisis during her debate with Senator Biden.

Well, the bill has passed. It’s time for partisan politics now.

Where are the ads from your (not the NRCC or some 527) campaign rightfully tying this mess around the Democrats’ necks? We have Democrats on record, many on print, and almost as many on video not only defending but praising their friends at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and denying that their practices posed any risks to the nation’s economy and shielding them from closer oversight and regulation despite investigations that discovered highly questionable accounting practices at the GSEs.

We even have your principal from 2005 and even the Bush Administration from 2003 warning of the danger and proposing regulations to rein in those monsters’ shenanigans and Democrats (including Obama – one of the top three beneficiaries of Fannie Mae’s ill-gotten largess) rising as one in opposition.

So where are the ads from your campaign – hard-hitting and explicit – educating the American people about all this?

Because I really do not want to believe that James Pethokoukis is wrong here, that your campaign has made the decision (for three very [1] unserious, [2] cowardly, [3] asinine reasons) to kindly let the Democrats continue to wrongly blame Republicans and laughably “deregulation” (when they actually shielded the GSEs from even the most basic regulatory regimes) for a crisis that their greed and shortsightedness are primarily responsible for.

Sir(s), your decision to wall off Governor Palin, your campaign’s greatest asset, and shamefully remain silent while the Obamaphile media engaged in a three-week long character assassination campaign against her was a mistake of Bush/New Tone™ level proportions.

Trust me when I say that this would be even worse. Not only would you be allowing the opposition and their friends in the media to peel off marginally-informed (the bulk of) Independents, whose votes you need, through the endless repetition of the false information blaming Republicans as the cause of this crisis – as they have been successfully doing for the past two weeks, you will lose the active support and enthusiasm of millions of Republicans.

This is no time for bipartisanship. It’s an Election and it is four weeks away. You’re supposed to provide the people with a clear choice and that means some attempt to point out the other side’s myriad of shortcomings. You cannot afford, at this late date, to deliberately miss opportunities on the horribly mistaken assumption that voters would think you noble for staying your hand and give you their votes.

President Bush’s New Tone™ philosophy was based on this assumption, and I need not tell you that it is pure bunk – a look at his approval ratings should have been enough to tell anyone that, least of all (an) experienced hand(s) like you.

Please tell your candidate to block his ears from the siren song of “Bipartisanship” and find that fighting spirit that carried him through to victory in the Primaries after everyone had thought him dead and buried.

Else, let us know now that he never was in it to win, so we can find better things to do with our time and money (such as plan for how to live under high-taxing, high-spending, job-destroying, family undermining Democratic Administration and Congress) than spend them on someone manifestedly not worth it.

Let me see those ads.

Sincerely,
Martin A. Knight